Start Strong with Communities in Teams

Overview (topic + goal)

• The session explains Microsoft’s strategy for bringing Viva Engage “Communities” into Microsoft Teams more natively, so employees can participate in community discussions inside their Teams workflow.
• The focus is on being ready to “start strong”: prepare governance, community structure, and adoption ahead of rollout rather than launching everything at once.

Availability / rollout

• Communities + Teams experience is available in Public Preview today.
• The presenter notes a slow rollout to production, with targeting roughly mid-June to mid-July (as discussed in Q&A).
• Public preview support includes enabling the feature for selected users first, typically with help via tenant/Teams admin setup.

Key benefits of Communities in Teams

More than posting

• Leaders can listen
• Employees get answers faster
• Knowledge scales across the organization via multiple engagement formats

Not isolated content

• Community content doesn’t stay confined:
  • Conversations and content can feed into Copilot and the broader knowledge system.

Major product/UX changes demonstrated

• Teams left rail consolidation: chats, channels, and now communities appear alongside them.
• Inline content modalities in communities:
  • unread indicators (e.g., “green bar” for unread posts)
  • links
  • longer-form conversations
• Direct interaction without context switching:
  • users can react and reply inside the message thread directly in Teams
• Notifications and activity improvements:
  • activity like announcements, mentions, and new conversation alerts appears closer to where work happens
  • smart notification behavior: notifications aren’t redundantly sent across multiple locations once already seen

“All-company” community guidance (governance + noise control)

What “All company” is

• The All company community is described as:
  • the default community most employees have access to
  • a common source of misuse and “too much noise”

Recommendations

• Rename/rebrand and cleanup the All company purpose (example: renamed to “Employee news and events”)
• Mark the right items/communities as “official” so employees know where to look
• Apply posting permissions thoughtfully for large orgs (example mentioned: Microsoft has 200k+ in all-company)
• Use existing moderation/governance tools already available in Viva Engage

Co-pilot adoption community (recommended starting point)

Suggested as a support/knowledge space to launch early because it includes:

• Suggested members based on M365 Copilot licensing
• Suggested prompts and suggested content for admins
  • admins can edit/draft/schedule/share
• Trust/answer quality support:
  • ability to mark questions with “best answer” and/or “verified answer”
  • a visual cue for trust in responses
• Communities are framed as peer-learning spaces (“learn from each other,” not only top-down comms)

How to organize and manage communities within Teams

Users/admins can:

• favorite, hide, and group communities
• move/sort communities and create sections in the left rail
• search and join from within Teams

Hack mentioned:

• If there’s a limit with favorites in Engage web, Teams allows creating a favorites section to include more than 10 favorites (upper limit not confirmed).

30-day “Start Strong” action plan (pillars + tasks)

Pillar 1: Purpose

• Ensure employees understand what each community is for
• Reset All company:
  • define what belongs
  • define what “official” means
• Choose 2–3 community types to start:
  • broad companywide
  • support/knowledge
  • one community of practice/interest

Pillar 2: Participation

• Communities succeed via ongoing engagement, not just features
• Start with:
  • a welcome post
  • good questions
  • a simple posting cadence
    • consistency matters more than volume
• Use Copilot to draft conversation starters and plan engagement
• Use multiple post types:
  • questions/answers
  • praise
  • events

Pillar 3: People + governance (implied)

• Assign community admins and community experts
• Experts can mark best/verified answers and help maintain knowledge flow
• Align with HR/Legal/IT/corp comms before launch:
  • update usage policies
  • define creation/official rules

Community agent + Copilot-powered capabilities (preview + licensing)

• Community agent is in preview.
• Requires:
  • M365 Copilot license to turn on the agent (for admins)
  • community experts reviewing answers need appropriate Copilot licensing
  • community members can view responses without necessarily having a license
• Admin can configure grounding sources (e.g., the community itself and/or SharePoint).
• Positioned as a way to handle high-volume Q&A while building an evolving knowledge base.

Governance for cleaning up abandoned communities (Q&A)

• All Communities in Engage map to Microsoft 365 Groups, enabling:
  • expiration policies based on lack of activity (posts/reactions/views; configurable time window)
  • automated removal after notification, without admin action
• Additional approach:
  • perform a data export (where permitted) to analyze activity and identify communities to clean up.

Clarifications from Q&A (selected)

• Verified vs best answer
  • both supported
  • verified is a stronger trust/quality indication (explained conceptually via a trust/visual cue)
• Licensing for Copilot features
  • some Copilot-driven features (e.g., agent, summarization/content creation, trending themes/sentiment) require Copilot licensing
• Digest central management
  • no plans for central management of daily/weekly digest at the time
• Dynamic membership
  • depends on governance; more flexibility is expected (dynamic groups can be used)
• Content governance/moderation
  • guidance includes usage policies, leader modeling of norms, moderation tools, and AI-powered theme moderation

Main speakers / sources (identified in subtitles)

• Steve Wyn (host/intro)
• Allison (leads most of the walkthrough and live demo portion)
• Sarah (presenter; contributes to guidance and answers in Q&A)
• Additional supporting team members referenced:
  • Robin
  • Valet
• Q&A participant referenced:
  • Jennifer Knight (question about cleaning up abandoned communities)